Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (67 page)

Wherever you go in Myanmar, you are in a former capital—a place where some ethnic group reigned for a while. Bagan was the capital from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. That was the era when it became fashionable to build pagodas and temples, and noblemen competed with one another to construct the grandest and most splendid, while poorer people built more modest structures. The detritus of that spiritual one-upmanship is a twenty-six-square-mile plain festooned with 4,446 religious monuments. It’s impossible to understand this trove through photographs, because its power lies in its sweep. We walked among the pagodas; we drove among them;
we climbed one of the temples to watch the sun set; we surveyed the whole gloriously littered landscape from a hot-air balloon. Even in person, it’s hard to compass the scale of Bagan’s Plain of Temples. It’s bigger than Manhattan, more than eight times the size of the estate of Versailles. Some of the buildings have been poorly restored by the junta, others are dilapidated but still coherent, and countless others lie in ruins. Whichever one you are looking at, you see a thousand more over its shoulder. If one feels exalted by the Golden Rock, one is humbled by Bagan, for both what it was and what it is.

Issues of faith are a constant conversation, and many secular experiences are filtered through Buddhism. San San Oo, a psychiatrist in Yangon whom I met through friends, had been told repeatedly that Burmese people healed themselves through Buddhism and didn’t need her ministrations. She tried to explain that therapy might help people brutalized under the regime to emerge from post-traumatic stress disorder, but they insisted they would transcend it only through religious practice. San San Oo uses hypnosis and had finally managed to build a practice by characterizing hypnosis as a means for someone else to raise you to a meditative state. She told me she felt certain that it had the same brain-wave profile. Her husband, the artist Aung Min, who had been a provocateur before the reforms, said, “The Buddhist way means that anger is bad; it upsets emotion and thinking, causing only negativity and destruction. But I was so angry. So I did four months of hypnosis, and my anger diminished. It’s just deep meditation.”

While Buddhism predominates and Islam follows behind, other faiths are also in evidence. There is a significant Christian population, and there are even a few Burmese Jews. Sammy Samuels is descended from Iraqi Jewish merchants who came to Yangon in the nineteenth century and set up business selling Burmese tea and rice to India. They established the city’s synagogue, a Jewish school, and a cemetery, and they married Buddhist women who converted to Judaism. By 1919, some three thousand Jews were in Myanmar. After 1969, most of the community migrated to Israel or the United States, but not the Samuelses. Every day, Sammy’s father goes to the synagogue to greet visitors from abroad; the minister for religions attended an interfaith
service there. Burmese independence came the same year as the establishment of the state of Israel, creating an unlikely connection. The Burmese prime minister was the first head of state to visit Jerusalem after independence. Moshe Dayan and David Ben-Gurion have visited the Yangon synagogue. Even under the junta, Myanmar sent students to learn agriculture in Israel. Now the Jews find themselves championing the cause of the Muslims because both are beleaguered minorities uneasily united against Buddhist fundamentalism. Aye Lwin said, “We always were brothers, Muslim and Jews here.”

The Rohingya situation is separate from, albeit related to, armed conflicts waged chronically by several ethnic insurgencies that seek to establish a federal system in which they would enjoy greater autonomy. The Muslim problem proceeds from sectarian, demographic, and religious tensions; the armed conflict, from minority nationalism. “You can have one or two civil wars in a country. Here, there are seventeen going on,” Mitchell said. All of the contentious ethnic groups want the right to elect their own legislatures, and to teach in their own languages. In 2014, the government pushed for a nationwide cease-fire as a precondition for preliminary all-party peace talks. The agreement that was reached stipulated that future negotiations would include ethnic political and social leaders, not just military chiefs; and that those subsequent talks would address nondiscrimination, constitutional changes to support more ethnic/regional control, a more accountable security sector, and the clearance of land mines. “They are willing to leave the central government in charge of defense, currency, and international trade,” explained Win Min, a presidential adviser, “but they want to control education, social sectors, fisheries, transportation within their own state. And they want to get tax money from the natural resources extracted in their territories.”

Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts are also ideological. At the height of the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution, and the Khmer Rouge, the threat of escalating guerrilla warfare was terrifying to many Burmese. The military was eager to expel the remnants of Chiang’s Kuomintang army from mountains near the Chinese border, fearing an invasion.
At the same time, the Burmese military was fighting the Communists who opposed the regime. On several occasions, leaders of various ethnic groups sided with the Communists just because doing so gave them combined fighting strength. Thant Myint-U, who is also involved in peace negotiations, pointed out that Myanmar’s military government had justified itself by exaggerating “a half-century-old counterinsurgency campaign on autopilot.” Ma Thanegi said, “Since independence, there have been so many insurgencies, fighting not only the central government but also one another, that it’s a wonder they can keep things straight and not shoot their own people.”

The past few years have seen little sustained fighting, though skirmishes erupt when the government enters a contested territory to regain control of a road, build a dam, or establish dominance in a lucrative mining operation. British colonial rule never fully penetrated these remote, rugged areas, and infrastructure is as scarce as political stability. Some militias aim to defend local people against profiteers; others demand taxes from villagers. Other self-styled forces pursue their own business agenda; the three-thousand-strong Mong La National Democratic Alliance, for example, is led by a former Chinese Red Guard accused of running gambling and drug rings and trading in endangered wildlife. In Kachin, 120,000 people remain in government prisons because of their ethnic activism or sympathies; recent video footage shows the Myanmar army bombing Kachin trenches. The jadeite mines of Kachin produce several billion dollars a year, but little of that money trickles down to the Kachin people. In the Karen region, the average villager makes less than $1,000 a year and can see that Karen people a mile away on the Thai side are making $10,000.

When I traveled to Mon State, Kyi Zaw Lwin, a local politician and teacher, told me that he could not advance because he was only half Mon and therefore trusted by neither the Mon nor the Burmese. His mixed ethnicity far outweighed his politics, his experience, or his education. The Mon once had a kingdom comparable in scale to Thailand, but they were conquered by the Burmese in 1057—and they still want their original kingdom back. Individual states already have parliaments, so components of federalism are in place. But how much power should those parliaments have? And should
they represent everyone in the state, or just the dominant ethnic group? The consensus is that the central government should share power with regional lawmakers, but to what extent remains in contention.

Thant Myint-U believes that a peace deal is closer than at any time since 1948. Presidential adviser Win Min agrees that the level of trust between the ethnic fighters and the Myanmar army is exceptionally high. But Ko Minn Latt expressed grave concern that, with the nation as a whole unready for global competition, autonomous states were not ready to contend with such large neighboring economies as those of Thailand or Cambodia. The defining question is whether Myanmar can democratize without fragmenting into impotent pieces. How does the central government support a range of ethnic identities without losing a unifying, national one? How, indeed, can a national identity be forged that does not feel like a vestige of the generals’ artificial one? Many Myanmar-watchers fear a devolution similar to the splintering of the former Yugoslavia into long antithetical, warring republics.

The Buddhist emphasis on forgiveness is not without its ramifications here. There is, once more, little talk of retributive justice; moving on is more important than holding people to account. Win Min spent years in the jungle after the 1988 uprising; then he went to the United States to study, then moved to Thailand, where he became a professor. When he was invited to advise the new Burmese government, his family warned him that the regime might be using him to create an appearance of reform, but he yearned to be part of the changes he had hoped for. “We’re not at takeoff yet,” he said. “It takes time.”

Literary tea shops where writers gather for performances and readings have sprung up all over Yangon and Mandalay. “There’s a short-story tea shop just over there,” one local told me as we strolled through Yangon. “Detective writers and mystery writers go to the one next to the stop at the Macon Building. The poets go to Thirty-Seventh Street, and the novelists go to one on Thirty-Third Street.” Such events would have been impossible five years ago. Censorship under
the junta was applied most rigorously to politics, religion, and nudity. According to Tin Win Win (who goes by the pen name Ju), depictions of poverty were also prohibited, since they were thought to show the country in a bad light. You had to secure a license to publish a book, which first had to pass a prepublication review. In 2012, the head of the censorship department announced on national television, “If it is going to be a true democracy, we have to abolish censorship.” These days, as Ma Thanegi noted, “Any news of any unfairness anywhere, it’s in the papers. We have never before seen such a situation. Even if nothing is done, at least we know.” Journalists long precluded from criticizing the government now do little else.

Thant Thaw Kaung, a leading publisher and foreign-book distributor, sold an English-language encyclopedia in 2007. A friend pointed out a paragraph-long entry for “human rights.” Thant withdrew the whole encyclopedia, collecting all copies that had been delivered to stores, lest someone higher up notice and send him to jail. He now distributes his books in English more widely and has set up traveling libraries to bus books in Burmese into villages.

The government department overseeing book publication, previously called the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department, has been rechristened the Copyright and Registration Department. Although books are no longer censored line by line before publication, the department reviews them after publication, and those that are too broadly critical of the government or military are taken out of circulation. A bestselling author in Myanmar may sell up to a hundred thousand copies of a title, but few foreign books are translated into Burmese. Most writers concentrate on short-form prose and poetry for magazines. Blogging is achieving some reach. But Ma Thida suggested that writers had internalized the spirit of censorship, and that it would take a generation before anyone would write with authentic freedom. She has started a magazine and a newspaper and has exhorted younger writers to expand their scope, arguing that freedom withers if it is not exercised. Her publications touch on long-standing hot-button issues such as ethnic conflicts, and fresher terrain such as women’s, gay, and disability rights.

Nay Phone Latt decided in 2007 to inform expatriates about
what was happening in Myanmar by starting a blog, a platform then subject to neither censors nor editors. Because Myanmar had no functioning Internet, he did his blogging from Singapore. He never criticized the government directly; he wrote short stories and poems full of metaphor. One told of a tiger that came to a village, entered a pagoda, and decided to stay. The villagers believed that wild animals belonged in the forest, and some wanted to kill the tiger. The daughter of the village chief said that the problem was not the tiger, but the place where it had installed itself. But no one could get it out of the pagoda, so they lived in constant fear. “Magazines published these stories because the censors didn’t know what I meant,” Nay Phone Latt explained.

When he returned from Singapore just before the Saffron Revolution, he organized the Myanmar Blogging Society so journalists could learn how to file dispatches from Yangon that might reach the outside world. He believes that reporting from inside the country was key to the reforms that came in subsequent years. The government arrested Nay Phone Latt after someone found cartoons disrespectful of the regime in his e-mail in-box. He explained that anyone could send anything to his in-box without his approval, but his inquisitors did not believe him. He was interrogated for ten days, during which he was not allowed to sleep, was often beaten, was sometimes tied up, and was taken from place to place blindfolded, so that he didn’t know where he was or who the people questioning him were. “In a military regime, inside the prison and outside the prison are not so different because the whole country is like a prison,” he said.

Sentenced to more than twenty years’ incarceration, he was first sent to Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison, where Ma Thida had also done time. Once he was transferred to a lower-security prison in Rakhine, he was allowed to write letters to his family. Again he resorted to metaphor to describe what he saw. “It’s a very, very good place to concentrate,” he said. “We had the right to read. And my parents came to me every month and brought books. I was never sad. My narrow cell was just like a little library.” He invited other inmates to his cell and taught them English or read to them; he taught them about computers, though there was no computer there. He dictated
new stories to his parents, who published them under a pseudonym. After the 2012 general amnesty, he published his
Prison Letters
.

Nay Phone Latt said none of the political prisoners he knew had been afraid during their confinement. “Imprisonment made us stronger and more educated; prison is our university. There I learned never to focus on the long future. I learned to focus on the present.” Even now, he maintains, the government controls freedom of expression by law. “Not by pressure, by law. We can write, but sometimes they try to sue the journal, the editor, and the writer.” He pointed out that the Electronic Transition Act, under which he had been sentenced, remains on the books, though it has been amended to mandate shorter prison terms. The decision of which rules to enforce rests with the military. “We are not so safe,” he said. The chilling effect on journalists is strong.